Roland Barthes Quotes About Reality

Quotes about: Reality

• The Photograph is an extended, loaded evidence — as if it caricatured not the figure of what it represents (quite the converse) but its very existence ... The Photograph then becomes a bizarre (i)medium(i), a new form of hallucination: false on the level of perception, true on the level of time: a temporal hallucination, so to speak, a modest (o)shared(i) hallucination (on the one hand 'it is not there,' on the other 'but it has indeed been'): a mad image, chafed by reality.

  Roland Barthes

  Reality, Hands, Mad

• For the photograph's immobility is somehow the result of a perverse confusion between two concepts: the Real and the Live: by attesting that the object has been real, the photograph surreptitiously induces belief that it is alive, because of that delusion which makes us attribute to Reality an absolute superior, somehow eternal value; but by shifting this reality to the past ("this-has-been"), the photograph suggests that it is already dead.

  Roland Barthes

  Real, Past, Two

  "Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography". Essay by Roland Barthes (translated by R. Howard), 1980.

• The realists do not take the photograph for a 'copy' of reality, but for an emanation of past reality, a magic, not an art.

  Roland Barthes

  Photography, Art, Past

• Painting can feign reality without having seen it.

  Roland Barthes

  Reality, Painting

• In 1850, August Salzmann photographed, near Jerusalem, the road to Beith-Lehem (as it was spelled at the time): nothing but stony ground, olive trees; but three tenses dizzy my consciousness: my present, the time of Jesus, and that of the photographer, all this under the instance of 'reality' - and no longer through the elaborations of the text, whether fictional or poetic, which itself is never credible down to the root.

  Roland Barthes

  Jesus, Reality, August

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